July Goals

If you have been following this blog for a while, you may be familiar with my love for to-do lists and goal-setting- New Year’s Resolutions, Birthday goals, To-do list for the day and the whole week, you name it… I do it all. But keeping those resolutions? That’s a different matter. I might not get everything done, well, I never get everything done, but I’m way more productive on days when I have a clear idea of what needs to be accomplished than on those unplanned ones.

Setting concrete goals (goals that can be measured) helps me keep in mind where I’m supposed to head, what I should be doing right now to get there. Having those goals written or printed on a piece of paper keeps me from forgetting them.

This time I set a few goals for my kids for the month of July. There’s so much going on in Medha’s school, so much to keep up with: Her teachers have started teaching words while Medha is still struggling with letters; They are asked to match objects with their beginning sounds in assessments, while Medha is yet to grasp the concept of phonics. We have so much ground to cover, so much to learn before we are ready to get into the mad race. I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. That’s when I came up with a list of things to teach. And a time-frame within which to try and accomplish it. It was time to teach a few things to little Madhav too. I drew up 2 sets of goals for the 2.

To involve the kids in this project I decided to turn the goal-setting visual instead of just words on a piece of paper. I brought out a pile of newspapers and asked them to look for big bold letters and interesting pictures. This was fun and educative in itself as it gave me an opportunity to observe what kind of pictures captured their attention and to talk about some of the news, old though they might have been. Then I cut out relevant pictures and stuck them with glue on their separate goal sheets. I wrote the goals down with the help of a marker and used colored pencils to draw where I couldn’t find the right images. I pinned the sheets on our brand new notice-board. They didn’t turn out as fancy as I wanted them to, but the kids loved them. And that’s important, right?

Here are the goals and where we stand right now-

July Goals for Medha-

1. Identify all the letters– Still working on it.

2. Learn Phonics- Still working on it.

3. Learn addition of single digit numbers- Haven’t started yet.

4. Learn Student Council Speech- Learnt it and went to the Finals but didn’t get selected to the Council.

5. Learn a Prayer- Haven’t started yet.

6. Read a book by herself- She is resisting the idea and I’m not forcing her either. Maybe she isn’t ready yet.